Walter Mosley juggles three series, the best-known of which features black private eye Easy Rawlins. Fear Itself (Little, Brown, $24.95) is the second novel showcasing Watts used-bookstore owner Paris Minton and his muscular friend Fearless Jones. Paris steps inside the world of the black bourgeoisie, and it turns out to be filled with deceit and corruption, says the publisher.

Steve Hamilton, winner of Edgar and Anthony awards and a rising star in the genre, delivers another Alex McKnight mystery, Blood Is the Sky (Minotaur, $24.95), set in the Canadian wilderness.

Houston-based James Hime's debut mystery, The Night of the Dance (Minotaur, $23.95), set in Washington County, introduces former Texas Ranger Jeremiah Spur, Sheriff Dewey Sharpe and deputy Clyde Thomas, an African-American Dallas ex-cop, collaborating on a missing-person's case.

Another debut, Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs (Soho, $24), is a historical mystery set in 1920s England. The title character is a maid-turned-private investigator. The people at Houston's Murder by the Book, who know a thing or two about the genre, are very keen on this one.

Finally, Scotland's Alexander McCall Smith has the fourth in his charming series set in Botswana and featuring Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. The Kalahari TypingSchool for Men (Pantheon, $19.95) — what a terrific title — has the formidable Ramotswe nurturing the ambitions of her assistant, Mma Makutsi, who opens school of the title. It's encouraging to see a small book like this make the New York Times best-seller list.

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From the nonfiction aisles, you'll be hearing the strains of Hail to the Chief: Presidents and politics are the subject of three ballyhooed books.

About Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoir, Living History (Simon & Schuster, $28), there is little to report — the publisher didn't send out advance copies and isn't releasing anything other than the pub date (June 9) and the first printing. At a mere 1 million copies, Living History is no Harry Potter, but you should have less trouble getting your hands on it.

One source close to Clinton has been quoted as saying, It's going to be more candid than people think. She's going to lay out more of her feelings on certain [embarrassing] things than her critics expect, and she does not shy away from Monica Lewinsky. But she does not air huge amounts of dirty laundry. Two other presidential books are generating headlines. In The Clinton Wars (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30), his narrative of the second Bill Clinton term, aide Sidney Blumenthal has produced a two-fisted defense of his boss and an attack on the president's critics. Chapter titles — Hillary Under Siege, In Starr's Chamber, The Stolen Succession — give the flavor. Blumenthal, a one-time reporter for the Washington Post and the New Yorker, is a gifted writer, but at 822 pages, this one may be for serious political junkies.

Do we really need another biography of John F. Kennedy? Robert Dallek says yes. In The Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (Little, Brown, $30), Dallek writes that he didn't set out to produce another debunking book on JFK but to penetrate the veneer of glamour and charm to reconstruct the real man or as close to it as possible. Dallek, a respected and fair-minded historian, has uncovered evidence that Kennedy's medical problems were even more serious than previously thought (assuming that's possible), but he contends they did not impact presidential decision-making. Oh yes, Dallek also discloses JFK's dalliance with a 19-year-old intern.

If your politics tack starboard rather than port, you may find the latest from Ann Coulter (Slander) more to your taste. The title pulls no punches: Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Crown, $25.95). Liberals have a preternatural gift for always striking a position on the side of treason, writes Coulter. Red meat for the right, it's fair to say.

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For history enthusiasts, the summer brings solid fare. Evan Thomas, an editor at Newsweek and the author of Robert Kennedy: A Life, delivers John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy (Simon & Schuster, $26.95). Jones is one of those Revolutionary War-era figures about whom most American know little more than the name. Jones saw himself as a romantic, larger-than-life figure, according to Thomas, who also characterizes him as a naval strategist well ahead of his time.

America's wars generate an endless stream of books. Christian G. Appy's Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides (Viking, $34.95) is a useful addition to a very long shelf of books about that conflict. Appy spent five years traveling and interviewing participants for this oral history, which includes interviews with hawks, doves, Viet Cong as well as supporters of the Saigon government, and of course American veterans from all ranks.

Two respected Civil War historians address the most significant battle of that war. Gettysburg (Houghton Mifflin, $30) is by Stephen W. Sears, author of the well-received Landscape Turned Red, about the battle of Antietam. The book won't be out until August.

Arriving earlier is James M. McPherson's Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg (Crown, $16), a guided tour of the battlefield that includes the author's reflections on the epic fight. McPherson is widely regarded as the finest living historian of the Civil War.

On March 25, 1911, fire broke out at the Triangle Shirt Factory in New York's Greenwich Village. Before it was quenched, 146 people had died — 123 of them women. David Von Drehle's Triangle (Grove, $26) recounts both the events of that terrible day and the waves of Jewish and Italian immigration that provide their context.

History in a more cheerful key can be found in The Great Wave by Christopher Benfey ($25.95). Subtitled Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics and the Opening of Old Japan, the book centers on 19th-century American travelers ranging from Herman Melville to historian Henry Adams to artist John La Farge and their encounters with Japan's alien culture.

Iris Chang, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, has written a 496-page epic of her ancestry, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (Viking, $29.95). Chang's last book was the well-received Rape of Nanking, a shocking account of the Japanese army's sacking of that city during World War II.

British historian David Starkey turns his attention to King Henry VIII and his six wives. Much ink has been spilled over the years about the personalities and fates of these women. Yet Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (HarperCollins, $29.95) promises not only new facts but also a new interpretation of the roles they played in Henry's life and court. At 852 pages, it's a stout narration.

In The Mercury 13,Martha Ackmann tells the story of the 13 female pilots who trained in the early 1960s to be American astronauts. Despite passing all the tests, they were scrubbed from the space program. Publishers Weekly called the book both an uplifting narrative and a depressing indictment of rampant sexism.

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Interesting biographies this season include John D'Emilio's Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Free Press, $30), about the black civil-rights leader who, being homosexual, endured a double dose of prejudice.

Fans of the John Huston movie The Man Who Would Be King (and the Rudyard Kipling short story it's based on) will be intrigued by Ben MacIntyre's Josiah the Great (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24), the story of the American who inspired the tale. In 1838 Josiah Harlan, a Pennsylvania Quaker, planted the American flag in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan and proclaimed himself Prince of Ghor, Lord of the Hazarahs, and spiritual and military heir to Alexander the Great. The British gave him the boot, which I suppose is why Afghanistan did not become the 37th state.

Strapless by Deborah Davis tells the story of Virginie Gautreau, the 23-year-old New Orleans Creole who was the subject of John Singer Sargent's infamous 1884 painting Madame X — infamous because it originally showed one strap of Gautreau's elegant, low-cut dress slipping off her shoulder. Great scandal ensued. Coincidentally, Gautreau is also the subject of a new novel, I Am Madame X, by Gioia Diliberto (Scribner, $24).

Victorians scandalized by Madame X would be rendered utterly prostrate by Jane Juska's memoir, A Round-Heeled Woman (Villard, $23.95). Juska, a schoolteacher, put a personals ad in the newspaper: Before I turn 67 -- next March -- I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me. The response was overwhelming, and Juska is funny and frank about her adventures.

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Books on entertainment giants Lew Wasserman and Lucille Ball are in the offing. Connie Bruck's When Hollywood Had a King (Random House, $29.95) records Wasserman's rise from theater usher in Cleveland to president of MCA, the giant talent agency and film and television production company, a post that made him the most powerful man in Hollywood.

In August comes Stefan Kanfer's Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball (Knopf, $26.95). Kanfer tracks America's favorite comedian from her lonely childhood to her wildly successful, groundbreaking sitcom with husband Desi Arnaz to the couple's painful split and her difficult last years.

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What's summer without a family vacation? Journalist and novelist Mark Jacobson engineered the mother of all family trips. He and wife Nancy decided they couldn't take another moment watching their three children get any stupider, in the unvarnished words of Jacobson's publisher. So they packed up their two daughters (16 and 12) and son (9) and embarked on a three-month trip through Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal and India, ending up points west in England. The book is 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time (Atlantic Monthly, $24).

Scout's Honor: A Father's Unlikely Foray Into the Woods describes what happens when a big-city indoorsman dad learns that his only son wants to be a Boy Scout and hike in the woods. Peter Applebome, one-time Houston bureau chief for the New York Times, is the author.

The book records his son Ben's growing maturity. It was hard to know how much of Ben was a result of his parents, his genes, his schools, Scouts, happenstance, his horoscope or dumb luck, Applebome writes. But, using the Scout Law as a yardstick, I calculated that by the time he took off for High Adventure, he was very loyal, usually helpful, extremely friendly and courteous, exceptionally kind, reasonably obedient, usually cheerful, fairly thrifty, probably no more or less brave than most, quite clean, and not particularly reverent. Seemed fine to me.

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A Short History of Everything (Broadway Books, $27.50) is an engaging jaunt through Big Questions of science: How can we know how old the universe is? How did we discover there were black holes in space? How did the theory of plate tectonics revolutionize geology? Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods) spent time with leading scientists in the fields of archaeology, physics, biography, astronomy, chemistry and the like, asking the naive but obvious, outstandingly dumb questions. He reports his findings in clear, lively prose. This book is a Book of the Month Club main selection and is already turning up on best-seller lists.

Also in a scientific vein, Matt Ridley, whose Genome was a best seller, follows that up with Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human (HarperCollins, $25.95). Arguing against a false dichotomy, Ridley says that nature and nurture aren't mutually exclusive and that genes are designed to take their cue from nurture.

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Finally, two books on golf. John Feinstein (A Good Walk Spoiled) examines the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black, describing both the organizers behind the scenes and the players who vied for the title -- Tiger Woods, Nick Faldo et al. The book is Open: Inside the Ropes at Bethpage Black (Little, Brown, $29.95).

Don Van Natta Jr.'s First Off the Tee (Public Affairs, $26) is a book even nonduffers can love. You can learn a lot about an American president by observing how he plays golf, says Van Natta, who chronicles presidential hacking from Taft to Clinton and Bush.

Just don't confuse a mulligan — a do-over shot, of which Bill Clinton was inordinately fond -- with a muggle. The latter is a nonmagical human in the world of Harry Potter. Now you know.